Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez lost his battle with cancer Tuesday, silencing the leading voice of the Latin American left and plunging his divided oil-rich nation into an uncertain future.

“We have received the toughest and tragic information that... comandante President Hugo Chavez died today at 4:25 pm,” a tearful Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced on television, directly from a Caracas military hospital.

"Leading voice of the Latin American left" would not be an understatement, and fairly prominent in the global left conversation as well. Whether his revolution, or indeed his galvanizing impact on progessives the world over, will continue into the future remains to be seen.

Mixed bag. he did help the poor in the U.s. he did some things for the poor in his own country. The stain on his record is his attempt to be named president for life. He liked to provoke and some of that was good. he only stole a little and seemed to want power instead of money. I actualy enjoyed his needling the U.S. but some of the Amrican left should be embarassed for the ass kissing display when around Hugo.

Not quite president for life but I think this is what's being referenced.

Quote:

It also suggested measures that would have increased many of the president's powers, for instance increasing the presidential term limit to seven years, allowing the president to run for election indefinitely and centralizing powers in the executive.[197] The government put the suggested changes to a public referendum in December 2007.[209] Abstention rate was high however, with 43.95% of registered voters not turning out, and in the end the proposed changes were rejected by 50.65% of votes.[197][210] This would prove to the first electoral loss that Chávez had faced in the thirteen electoral contests held since he took power,[197] something analysts argued was due to the top-down nature of the changes, as well as general public dissatisfaction with "the absence of internal debate on its content, as well as dissatisfaction with the running of the social programmes, increasing street crime, and with corruption within the government."[211]
In order to ensure that his Bolivarian Revolution became socially engrained in Venezuela, Chávez discussed his wish to stand for re-election when his term ran out in 2013, and spoke of ruling beyond 2030.[212] Under the 1999 constitution, he could not legally stand for re-election again, and so brought about a referendum on 15 February 2009 to abolish the two-term limit for all public offices, including the presidency.[213] Approximately 70% of the Venezuelan electorate voted, and they approved this alteration to the constitution with over 54% in favor, allowing any elected official the chance to try to run indefinitely.[212][213][214]

Viewed in the light of how other world leaders have behaved, Chavez's actions aren't all that over-the-line. I believe the constitution of the Fifth Republic in France was desgined to give Charles De Gaulle whatever powers he thought he personally needed to govern France effectively. That one originally mandated a seven-year presidential term, with no term limits.

One of the other reasons why many American hawks chose to obsess over Venezuela and the threat it supposedly posed to the U.S. was that Chavez liked to identify himself with virtually every other pariah state around the world. This was part of his posturing as an anti-American leader, and it involved some Venezuelan support for other authoritarian states, but the importance of these connections was frequently blown out of proportion in the same way that Chavez’s importance in the hemisphere was. Years before his death, Chavez’s influence in the region was on the wane, and he had been passed by a more successful cadre of elected leftist leaders in other countries that addressed many of the same social and economic problems without the abuse of power, corruption, and epic mismanagement. Chavez fed off of the undue, largely hostile attention that Americans paid to him, and he ended up acquiring more fame than he would have been able to do on his own.

The greatest trick Chavez ever managed to play on Americans was that he convinced many of us that he mattered to us.

The irony of the article is that it focuses on Chavez too much through an American perspective. Chavez certainly mattered to Venezuelans.

I have had many Venezuelan students (in a non-carnal fashion) over the last couple years and while most of them are/were anti-Chavez-family-lives/vacations-in Miami sorts, what I have learned is that the country is very politically divided.

I have had many Venezuelan students (in a non-carnal fashion) over the last couple years and while most of them are/were anti-Chavez-family-lives/vacations-in Miami sorts, what I have learned is that the country is very politically divided.

Reminds me of the US in some ways, actually.

Many of my colleagues are Venezuelan. They'll piss and moan about HC for hours.

For them, he was a net-positive. They got to leave Venezuela with ease. These upper middle class financial managers etc are "political refugees" and found easy visas into the USA. Not one of them will go back to that dump because HC is dead.